West America & Porridge Radio – hello dog friendly

Writing about music is completely pointless, it’s like dancing to explain a mathematical equation. Possible, but you need to understand both dancing and maths to know what’s being conveyed, in which case why am I dancing if we could just do math together? If you’re looking for an opinion, which is as flattering as it is unsettling, I think ‘hello dog friendly’ is worth listening to and there’s a couple of songs that stand out. West America’s The World Destroys Itself, if you like Slint, Gentrify The Moon, because the initial spoken word frames the following punky outburst as poetry; Porridge Radio’s Get Out Of My House, because it’s different, and Born Confused, because it showcases some of their best songwriting in a neat little bundle.

By now you’ve likely stopped reading, the point is to get you to listen anyway, so if you haven’t yet, please do, because I just want to wrap things up with little dance about being lo-fi in a digital era. Listen to Lou Barlow’s Sentridoh or Elliott Smith’s first three albums and you’ll see that the precursors to modern lo-fi were mainly about pursuing musical creation despite technological adversity. Low bandwidths and distortions were never the point, they were the obstacle, and those guys milked the juice out of what they had with creative panning and ear-tickling double-tracks. Today, higher fidelity recording is more available than ever and milking the juice stopped being the point, because if bands truly milked all the juices out of the equipment that is commonly available around them, there would no longer be anything resembling a lo-fi sound. Since technological adversity is mostly gone, lo-fi is now a conscious aesthetic choice. But what’s the point?